This looks pretty good. They have lots of industry contacts, Algorithmix is involved with a professional-looking dynamic range meter (it appears to be a variant of Chromatix's technique, actually), which is already released. They aren't focusing on visual waveform plots (yay) and are instead focusing on industry interaction.

I've run their offline tool against a subset of my test archive. This is on a per-track basis, which is not how they recommend, but it's still instructive.

Let's start with the good news: anything recorded without compressors (Bach, Berlioz, Leftfield) is very consistently in the 11-14 dB range. There are exceptions in the form of Wachet Auf, which is predictably a little lower (due to the timbre of the only instrument), and one track of the Berlioz, which is all the way up at 17 dB (!) due to the relatively few, brief, yet dramatic climaxes in it. (Berlioz has downright extreme long-term DR, which seems to have caused some difficulty for the recordist on the final, loudest track.)

Now for the bad news: RHCP "Californication" consistently gets a per-track score of about 4 dB, with at least one stuck at 3 dB.

Wait, did I say that was bad news? Bad scores, yes, but very good news - since the tool has successfully identified a classic offender from a sea of excellence.

And now for the really bad news. I tried to use it on some files from a game's soundtrack. It refused to process them on the grounds that they were 48kHz rather than CD format. So I would have to resample them before I can measure them. There's no reason for this restriction that I can imagine, except for cutting down on the test regimen. The authors specifically state that they do not use any psychoacoustic filtering, which would occasion the algorithm being sample-rate specific.

I "treated" my dad to one of the worst RHCP tracks. I asked him: "Can you even tell the difference between the verse and the chorus?" He is competent in singing himself, though more likely 16th century than 21st century music. Then I contrasted it with some 1995 Leftfield, noting that with the compressors and limiters removed, there was actually room to put things in the background of the music. He agreed completely, and this was with his mid-50s ears and a huge pile of my computer fans whirring away.